NEW COURSES!!

Spring 2025: Delve into some Dublinese via The Dubliners short stories

26th March 2025 from 4pm to 7pm
At the ZURICH JAMES JOYCE FOUNDATION

Dear SATE members and fellow anglophiles
It is with great pleasure that we can finally present our spring "twilight session" with the wonderful Dr. Martin Mühlheim. Martin will take us on a Joycean journey in Zürich, namely to the Zürich James Joyce Foundation where we can delve into some Dublinese via The Dubliners short stories! Not only will we get poetic and musical inputs, but also an array of fun activities that can be adapted to any ELA/ literature classroom.
It will be a "twilight session" to accommodate our hectic schedules and to ease the guilty conscience of taking time out for ourselves! Places are limited to 25 and the fee is CHF 30 per person. So, please fill in the registration form below by the 12th of March 2025 in order to sign up to this event!
For those of you who would like to dip into the analogue world of pints and spirits we will be heading to the Joyce pub for a night cap. The craic will be ninety and the banter of "liquid Joyce" a guarantee!
Hope to see you there.
Is mise le meas,
Orlaith Nellen (& gang - aka the SATE committee)

26th March 2025 from 4pm to 7pm
ZURICH JAMES JOYCE FOUNDATION
, Augustinergasse 9, 
8001 Zurich
(top floor above the museum Strauhof)

Four Plays in Five Days – London Drama Course 2025

Dates: Monday Oct 6th – Friday Oct 10th 2025

This is the continuation of Peter Storfer’s “5 plays in 5 days”. Still in the same spirit but in a slightly new format, you will discover four plays of different periods, see them on stage, get an insight into the process from the page to the stage. Not only will you get an idea of theatre tradition in London but you will also have the opportunity to meet people from the theatre world. Here is the comment of one of last year’s participants: “It was a truly wonderful course looking at 4 plays from various angles and going to watch them at different London theatres. We met with 2 actors, a writer and a stage manager! I would recommend it to all our teachers.”

Everybody who is interested in theatre is welcome. For more information and/or enrolment please go to webpalette: https://www.webpalette.ch/de/kurse/4-plays-in-5-days-3

Organisers: Susanna Lehmann & Chantal Gruber

Fall 2025: Jacob Sam-La Rose

Date: November 27 and 28 at Neue Kantonsschule Aarau (NKSA)

Registration opens in June.

 Biography

 For it to exist in the real world, my work has to be bigger than myself.

Jacob Sam-La Rose (born 8th June 1976) is a poet, educator and editor. His enthusiasm for using poetry as a tool for education and interaction has made him a renowned and inspirational figure in the poetry and educational communities alike. As a consultant for creative writing and literature, Sam-La Rose has run workshops and held residencies internationally at hundreds of schools and other institutions, and has facilitated programmes for poets and writers of all ages. He is particularly well known for his work with youth ‘slam’ poetry initiatives, and his advocacy for the positive impact of new technology on literary practice and collaboration. He has led workshops at Botswana University, for the Ministry of Education in Malaysia, and has developed spoken word programmes with organisations such as the British Council, the National Theatre, the Arvon Foundation, the Roundhouse, the Barbican, and Apples & Snakes. His level of involvement in and commitment to these projects has resulted in his being described as “a one-man literary industry…passionate about poetry and its power to change people’s lives.” (Patrick Neate)

An admired poet and performer, Sam-La Rose has appeared at a wide range of venues and festivals, including Kiasma (Finland), the Centre of Contemporary Art (Glasgow), London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Aldeburgh Literary Festival, the Gwendolyn Brooks Writers’ Conference (Chicago), and The URB Festival (Helsinki). His poems have been published in Identity Parade – New British & Irish Poets; Penguin’s Poems For Love; I Have Found A Song; Learn Then Burn: The Ultimate Poetry Guide for the High School or College Classroom; and Michael Rosen’s A-Z: The Best Children’s Poetry from Agard to Zephaniah, among many other anthologies and journals. His first pamphlet Communion was a Poetry Book Society selection in 2006, and was described by the judges as “fresh, vivid and masterly in its evocation of contemporary Britain”, and as “a thoughtful, pensive and carefully structured collection, where the finest poems quietly but firmly capture relationships in all of their tenuousness, tenderness, disappointments and promise” by Lauri Ramey. His work is grounded in a belief that poetry can be a powerful force within a community, and has united in praise the sometimes divided strands of ‘performance’ and ‘page’ poetry, proving it is possible to combine the immediacy of performance with the rigor of poetry on the page.

He has described himself as the product of a post-colonial Caribbean work ethic passed down from his mother, something that has morphed into his own rigorous professional drive. “My work as a poet came to mean more than just being the best writer I could be. For it to exist in the real world, my work has to be bigger than myself, in the same way that so many of my elders worked for the benefit of future generations – and so it extends into changing mainstream attitudes towards poetry, and helping to nurture other emerging poets.” It is this generosity of spirit and collectivist outlook that sets him apart from many other poets and performers – Sam-La Rose is an active, participatory force in the literary world whose dedicated efforts to include young people in the practice and possibilities of poetry have touched many.

In this recording for the Poetry Archive, Sam-La Rose’s understated yet forceful poetic gifts are brought to the fore by a reading style that is measured, intimate and concise. The poems are highly articulate constructions with an elegant sense of phrase, and a considered, reasoning tone, which steers language towards various emotional truths, realising the logic of genuine and nuanced feelings, often particular to the contemporary era. Sam-La Rose achieves this via virtuosic leaps and image-making, in work that is consistently generous and surprising. Sam-La Rose’s collection Breaking Silence was published by Bloodaxe in Autumn, 2011.

Jacob Sam-La Rose’s Favourite Poetry Sayings
“I do believe poetry changes the world: it changes the world by changing the way we think about the world.” – Kathleen Graber

“Any intention of writing poetry beyond the most basic aim to make a poem, of engaging the materials, SHOULD be disappointed. If the poet does not have the chutzpah to jeopardize habituated assumptions and practices, what will be produced will be sleep without dream, a copy of a copy of a copy. The poem always intends otherwise. At every moment, the poet must be ready to abandon any prior intention in welcome expectation of what the poem is beginning to signal. More than intending, the poet ATTENDS! Attends to the conspiracy of words as it reveals itself as a poem, to its murmurs of radiant content that may be encouraged to shout, to its muffled musics there to be discovered and conducted.” – Dean Young

“Can you do that? Can you just plug in some made up thing and end up with solutions? Can you simply draw some imaginary lines and end up with a better map? You don’t expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until you discover something, something big and useful, but shouldn’t this something have to be real? Let’s jump ahead 125 years. It’s 1922 and Ludwig Wittgenstein has just published his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus which insists, among other things, that the limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Or, put another way: how you say it is how you think it. And, more dramatically: if you can’t say it, you can’t think it. And, if you can’t think it, how can you solve it?” – Richard Siken